The social network service (SNS) is a technical application framework under the Web 2.0 system. Its goal is to help people establish a social network. Through the establishment of the social network by social friend relationships, friends can share human resources with each other, and resolve particular application problems during the establishment process. The SNS can help to achieve sharing of personal data processing, personal social relationships management, and reliable business information, to securely share personal information and knowledge with trustworthy people, and to utilize the trusted relationships to expand the social network to achieve a more valuable communication and collaboration.
The SNS includes online users and their relationship networks, and can achieve accurate search and effective transmission of information, thereby satisfying different needs of the users and enterprises. The SNS community is a social network system that is built based on the SNS theories. The SNS contains massive amounts of users and relationship data. Thus, there is a basic problem to resolve: how to find valuable and interesting information from the massive amounts of social network data. Apparently, the users and enterprises are not interested in all of the massive amounts of users and relationship data in the social networks, and are only interested in a relationship circle of specific targets.
In the SNS community, users often have to connect with many unfamiliar people and become friends with them, in order to establish SNS relationships. Generally, the users can directly add a friend according to the registered email information; or they can also use email addresses of contacts in the address book of email, instant messaging, and other client messaging services to match corresponding friends.
In the process of implementing the present disclosure, the inventors discovered that the current techniques have at least the following problems. When using email addresses in the address book to match friends, the current techniques rely on the user's participation and corresponding inputs. For example, the user has to enter the email address, user name or password to log in the instant messaging software to find corresponding friends by searching the email address, user name, user ID, nickname, and so forth. Such techniques cannot realize fully automated matching, and may even cause password leakage during the matching. In addition, the above-mentioned process depends on the open interface port and data format of the email and instant messaging service. Once there is a change in the interface and data format, the matching function will not work. On the other hand, the matched friends are all contacts at the network, which is quite limited. People who are not contacts in the network but the user knows in the real world cannot be matched. Further, contacts in the email or instant messaging are not necessarily SNS users, thus the successful rate in matching friends is very low.